I am leaving or China in 5 days and thought I would check to see how possible it would be to post to Twitter from China. I will be renting a cell phone, but text messages to the US are expensive, and texting to Twitter from China means sending an SMS to the U.K. A quick google search turned up this very helpful workaround from Pandapassport: sign up for Fanfou.com, China’s version of Twitter, then send the feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed. Nifty. But fanfou is all in Chinese! I managed to sign up for fanfou (jolifanta’s fanfou page) by deciphering some basic Chinese. Fanfou’s UI is exactly like Twitter, so I could pretty much guess what the text was based on placement on Twitter. I had some help in this with nciku.com, my favorite online Chinese dictionary, which lets you DRAW the characters! You just need a basic knowledge of stroke order rules and voila, you can look up any word without knowing those pesky radicals.

Signing up for twitterfeed was easy in comparison (although I have yet to see my fanfou upodate appear in my Twitter feed…crossing my fingers). Next problem–how to verify my Chinese phone for fanfou?? Crap, my Chinese isn’t good enough to tackle this: despite the photos, I have no idea what this is saying. It is way too much for nciku translation, one character at a time. So I tried Google agian. I googled the url for this page and in google search results hit “translate” – voila! “No plug rice blog!” Well, yeah, it’s not the perfect translation, but it was enough for me to get the gist. And I could even navigate within the translator to other pages, where I found the SMS phone number that I will (hopefully) be able to use to send updates to fanfou. Phew…we’ll find out in a few days if all this works.

Following on the Museums and the Web conference last week, Nina Simon made an excellent observation in a great blog post Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto: Are Museums Evolving with their Innovative Web Strategies?:

“Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? Or is the web the dumping ground for activities too messy or uncomfortable to do onsite?”

She goes on to describe the disconnect she felt when visiting the Indianapolis Museum of Art, after visiting their super-Web 2.0 Web site. It was just a normal museum, not what she’d expected from a museum with such a participatory Web site, famous for its transparency that lays bare the inner workings of the institution. There’s a great conversation in the comments to her post among Museum technologists and staff about the nature of participation in museums (it’s a good read!). I feel like we really need to ask ourselves, What do we expect visitors will do on our virtual and real world sites? Do they have to do the same types of activities in both spaces? On one level, Nina’s right. There is a disconnect. But is it fair to compare? I also have a similar disconnect between my real-world home and my FaceBook home. The real one is decidedly quiet. It’s where I study, and eat, and sleep, and play with the dog . While the FB home is really loud with tons of people streaming through, taking quizzes, and posting photos *all the time* because I have friends all over the world. I am not saying that museums don’t have anything to learn from online social media. I just ask about what we expect from these different spaces. As the comments on Nina’s post show, it is very instructiveto think this through , but is it fair to compare?

HP’s new MagCloud service allows anyone with a computer and some design skillz to publish glossy magazines. This kind of self-publishing was the realm of hand-crafted zines. (Check out the cool new NYT slideshow+audio presentation too!). View the slideshow.

Read the article at NYT.com.

Went to LACMA’s late Night Art event last night. They made very good use of the space between the Ahmanson and BCAM buildings, behind the Urban Light installation—a space I started to call the “crack in the Lac” with my friends. DJs pumping out the German techno and outdoor seating with bar created a very pleasant outdor hangout space. The best part though was behind the projection screen, where some LACMA staff (perhaps education staff? They always have the most fun) were there with art-making supplies for making puppets and photocopies of Franz West’s face for mask-making, and a mini installation of liquor bottles plastered a la Franz West (hidden treasures for sure).

The art was a bit difficult to see due to the crowds, and the readings in the galleries, which sometimes blocked the art from those of us who didn’t want to listen to the spoken word. Franz West was not for me (except as a cut-out puppet I made), but the Art of Two Germanys exhibition was quite impressive. It was huge though, and although the art was a bit depressing, you got the sense of something that must be important. Highlights included some great still photographs of performance events, including artists like Josef Beuys and Nam June Paik; and some monstrous Anselm Kieffer paintings. In one room, a chocolate sculpture by Dieter Roth proved how experiencing art through unexpected sensory information can make you take a second look (see object on left in image below). I had dismissed it on first glance, but then smelled chocolate and had to find the source of the smell. Those little terracotta monkeys are actually chocolate (and lions). One well-placed performance inside the gallery was a musician playing a leaden sounding composition on a double-bass in a room with a glasnost-era oil painting of Ronald Reagan looking skyward, and a red carpet leading away from him across the room.

Gallery installation shot of LACMA’s The Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.

Made a quick visit to Santa Monica Museum of Art yesterday to visit a friend who works there and was taken aback by their wonderful exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. It’s presented like an installation, with stuffed and decorated goat skins, and thrones carved from wood and animal horns arranged around the floor of the room, which they opened up to one big room with the high warehouse ceiling opened up.

Elias Sime at SMMA, image from http://micheleguieu.blogspot.com/

I was reminded of Ethiopia, probably because of the colors and materials. The brown and earthy tenor of the whole room, highlighted with bright colors of plastic and threads within the larger pieces are the colors of Ethiopia, where mud and rocks prevail. The goat skins and thrones, along with mud and straw sculptures of monkeys in one corner, are made from the materials traditionally ised forbuilding traditional tukuls ( before eucalyptus was introduced in the 19th century!). A video in the back room, narrated by an enthusiastic Peter Sellars, gives a great view of the artist’s life within his community in Addis.

Although the goat skins and thrones dominate the room (I love the wooden carved feet emerging from some of the thrones!), the stitched canvas paintings hung on the walls are surreal and impressive in their craftsmanship. The imagery is pure modernism–heroic and masculine, but every line is stitched into the canvas (by hand? I think so.). You get close and you can feel the tenacity required to manually create the broad strokes of color one 1/4-inch stitch at a time.

My favorite part of the installation is video that you can control, taking you through the streets of Addis. They simply attached a camera to a car and drove around. It really gives a sense of this city, which my dad calls an “overgrown village.”

Check out this blog, which has loads of great photos, including Peter Sellars’ gigantic face from one of the the videos.

See some of my own photos from Ethiopia, and read about my travels there by choosing the “Ethiopia” tag on this blog, or visit my Flickr page.

For Katie Lewis’s first one-gal show, she drapes a room in colorful squiggling lines that emerge from holes in the ceiling, pile up on the floor, and loop along on the baseboards. They are meant to be non-words, cursive letters strung together that evoke thoughts—or perhaps the act of associative thinking, meandering from idea to idea. But they also remind me of sculptural yarn tangled (think Nicola Vruwink), the endless doodles I made in class high school, or the curly electric wires of Christmas lights.

This is a brilliant idea for an art show: commission a slew of local artists to create little drawings on Post-It notes, stick them to your gallery wall, and charge about $20 for each. It’s Cash-and-Carry–when you buy it, you take it home. It’s a great way to make original works of art affordable, makes a really fun exhibition to explore, encourages the artists to have fun and experiment, and exposes your audience to a whole bunch of new artists all at once! I love it.

On view at the GR2 store/gallery on Sawtelle in West L.A. through January 14. But hurry! They are disappearing fast! They should do this again!

Giant Robot GR2 Post-It Note exhibition

We had a record turnout in the election on Tuesday. I waited in line for an hour, bonding with my co-voters. But we got nothing on Switzerland, with its “direct democracy.” The people in local cantonments gather in the town square to vote by show of hands. It’s called “Landsgemeinde” and thousands show up.

Cool photo with requisite matterhorn-ish mountain here: http://www.daylife.com/photo/0gnn667fRx5dZ

The first presidential debate is over and I still had PBS on the tv when Bill Moyers comes on with a very impressive guest: Andrew Bacevich. I have been completely sucked into this interview with this person who has such a deep and clear understanding of history and what it can teach us about where our country has ended up at this moment in time. I agree with so much of what he is saying, especially that we have created an “Imperial Presidency” over the past 40 years. I was surprised to find out that Bacevich is a conservative. Educated at West Point, with a PdD in History from Princeton, he served in both Vietnam and the Gulf War

Watch Bill Moyers’ interview with Andrew Bacevich.

Read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of Power.

This post begins with a big old sigh: >> S I G H <<

I have been had.
I don’t know by whom, or how, but someone has been using my debit card number at gas stations in another state on the opposite coast from where I live. Thankfully, Washington Mutual noticed the odd behavior and called me on Monday to let me know that there were some “suspicious” transactions on Sunday. They told me to watch my account and report to them any transactions I did not authorize to their fraud department.

I am lucky. I have only had about $400 taken from my account, and I had enough in my account that I didn’t accrue any overdraft charges. And, my bank caught it and called me. Kudos to WaMu (I hope they live up to these kudos by honoring my claim and covering the stolen money).

Here’s what I learned from the experience, both from my bank, and from doing a little bit of research:

All the transactions were at a gas station – perhaps that is the connection. I do pay for gas with my debit card. My card information may have been taken when I swiped it at a gas station by a card skimmer. A quick search on google revealed numerous recent reports of card skimming scams at gas stations. Here are a few:
SFGate article (5/30/08), “San Jose gas station center of debit card scam”
SeattlePI (07/21/08) “Puyallup gas station customers scammed in debit card fraud”

One person I talked to in the Fraud dept at WaMu told me that transactions from gas stations take longer to post to the bank than most. I wonder if this is an opportunity for thieves – the longer it takes to post, the less likely you’ll notice in a timely manner. It buys them time.

Paying with a credit card is probably safer. It’s not a direct line to the cash in your account the way debit is. And credit cards often have strict fraud processes built in for their customers’ protection. A few articles I read online mention a recent rise in debit card fraud. Here’s an article from Reader’s Digest that suggests some ways to protect yourself: “Avoid these Debit Card Traps”.

I also learned that there are different kinds of cards banks issue. The old-school ATM cards, which allowed you to take cash out of an ATM machine, were not debit cards. Many banks stopped issuing these in favor of the Visa or MC-sponsored debit card. They get a cut of the action when these cards are used. Some consumer advocate groups are pushing to reinstate the plain old ATM cards. Here’s an article from PIRG on the topic: PIRG Consumer Fact Sheet on ATM/Debit cards (there’s no date on this page and I suspect it may have been posted a while ago, but much of the information still seems relevant.)

Stay safe and guard your debit card!